The Eyre Affair

By -
The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde

Lately I've been wanting to re-read some old favorites, and I picked up The Eyre Affair.  I love the Thursday Next books but haven't re-read them at all, and I'd forgotten a lot!

Thursday is a Special Operations officer in the Literary Fraud division--she tracks down counterfeit Cardenios and the like.  In the alternate Britain she lives in, the Crimean War has been going on for over 100 years, genetic sequencing has allowed everyone to have dodos and thylacines for pets, and literature is a national obsession.  Radical Marlovians firebomb Baconian meetings, thousands of people have changed their names to Percy Shelley or John Milton, that sort of thing.

The super-criminal genius Acheron Hades has stolen both Thursday's Uncle Mycroft and the manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit.  With Mycroft's invention that allows entry into books, he plans to kill off beloved literary characters until the ransom is paid.  And Jane Eyre is his next victim!

The whole thing is just a barefoot romp through the meadows of literature, history, and general weirdness.  Bibliophiles can't not love it. 

My favorite joke is probably the one where a John Keats gets mugged by a Percy Shelley, who leaves a tract on atheism behind him.  What's yours?

Comments

  1. Christine HardingFebruary 27, 2013 at 2:52 AM

    Oh dear, I'm sorry to say I've just relegated this to a pile of books destined for the charity shop. I've had it for several years, and tried and tried to read it, but just couldn't get along with it. I'm obviously missing something!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanFebruary 27, 2013 at 7:35 AM

    Hey, no book can please everyone! Just think of how happy someone will be to find it in the charity shop. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownMarch 16, 2013 at 6:34 PM

    This was one of my favorite books last year. I thought it was creative and hilarious. I've not continued on with the entire series, though, because that's the type of humor I appreciate in small amounts rather than in overload. It's about time I pick up the third book....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more